Open Source for Start Ups

Medgar Jones, Knowledge Level: All Levels, Keywords: open source software, start up business, open source start up

It was 2004 and a company with which I was consulting was literally days away from landing their first round of venture capital. They were surprised but not concerned when the venture capital firm asked if they could send over some folks to do a quick "audit" of the facilities and systems as this was an online-service. Hours later, the deal had crumbled beneath them, and the investors had turned their eyes on their competitors down the street.

One of the big oversights made by many start-ups hoping to land Venture Capital funding at any point is that some serious auditing is going to take place before any money exchanges hands. Unfortunately, many start-ups "wing" the small business software bit by taking advantage of less-than-kosher methods of procuring the software necessary to run their business. As easy as it may be to get access to that latest copy of Photoshop, when the big guys come to visit and determine whether or not your business is worthy of investment, these types of details will come to light.

So what is the solution? Open Source - a growing start up company can save over $1000 per new employee and tens of thousands in upgrade costs yearly by simply switching to open source alternatives. Here is the break down of a web designer employee's needs which were recently met using open source solutions.

Whenever possible, we switched the paid version with the open source version and, if not available, ate the costs. We even made sure to give the bundled (cheaper) price when displaying the cost of the whole thing but showed the more expensive single cost for individual items, giving an additional advantage to paid software.

Microsoft Office Professional	$499
Excel	OpenOffice Calc
Outlook	Mozilla Thunderbird
Powerpoint	OpenOffice Impress
Publisher	Scribus
Word	OpenOffice Writer
Access	OpenOffice Base
Office Accounting Express	GnuCash
Adobe Creative Suite Web Premium	$1699.00
Photoshop	Gimpshop
Flash	$689.00
Dreamweaver	Amaya 10
Illustrator	Inkscape
Fireworks	$299
Acrobat 9	PDFCreator
Soundbooth	Audacity
Contribute	$199
Symantec Norton 360	$79.99
Norton AntiVirus	ClamWin + WinPooch
Norton Internet Security	WIPFW

Total Savings: $1090 per employee

Now let's do some simple math. If you add 5 employees your first year, 10 employees your second year, 20 employees your third year, and upgrade costs are roughly 30% of retail, you will save over $57,000 over 4 years and, very likely, will save your company from some huge headaches down the road. Medgar Jones is a serial entrepreneur and Open Source Enthusiast!. Article on open source software, start up business, open source start up by Medgar Jones

Tags: [cached]: money exchanges hands, venture capital funding, microsoft office professional, open source version, open source solutions, small business software, adobe creative suite, venture capital firm, start ups, start up company, big guys, ups, calc, web designer, thunderbird, auditing, fireworks, nbsp, tens of thousands, acrobat,

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